Infineon Execs Plead Guilty to Price-Fixing

An anonymous reader writes "Executives at Infineon Technologies plead guilty to an international conspiracy to fix prices in the DRAM market. Heinrich Florian, Günter Hefner, Peter Schaefer and T. Rudd Corwin, executives for Infineon Technologies, had a felony filed against them yesterday in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Each executive could spend up to six months in prison and will have to pay a $250,000 fine. Under the plea agreement, they must also assist the government in its DRAM investigation. Infineon agreed in October to pay a $160 million fine for its role in the conspiracy, according to the Justice Department."

Comments

Re:An honest question..

[cyberise]

Sure the companies make the millions of dollars and that is why Infineon was fined that 160 million. Im sure that the $250,000 fine per executive is going to make them feel some hurt in the wallet.

Re:An honest question..

[frovingslosh]

pay attention: Infineon agreed in October to pay a $160 million fine for its role in the conspiracy, according to the Justice Department

But yes, it is crazy to let the actual people who did this off with such a slap on the wrist. They ikely will still draw their fat cat pay checks while in prison if they ever do go too!

Re:An honest question..

[drjimmy42]

These companies make upwards of millions of dollars and you fine them a quarter of a million?

That is the fine for the individuals involved. The company was fined $160,000,000. That's slightly more painful.

Re:Sometimes this sort of behaviour may not be so

[Fallen Kell]

It was already prooven that DDR2 would not be better then DDR until speeds reached a minimum of 800 Mhz or higher on the FSB. The real difference will be felt at around 1.2 Ghz, which DDR2 can reach, but Intel being Intel (and not actually thinking out tech changes, but believing they can force it down their customers no matter if it is no better then other techs out and more expensive, think RDRAM), has decided to not actually release a chipset to use DDR2 at faster speeds until mid to late 2005. By which time, all customers will have felt the slow performance and get pissed because the PR didn't fit the product. Especially when they are forced to buy something that costs about 1.5-2x the cost of DDR and get no performance gain at all. It is again a case of Intel shooting its foot off in a race because the foot is extra weight, but not realizing that it actually needs that foot to stand on and run with! They have done this many times as of late and it is finally starting to show. Their stock has dropped considerably, their market share has dropped, and God forbid Mr. "I'm in Intel's back pocket" Dell, is going to start selling AMD based systems because companies are demanding it due to lack of progress from Intel over the last 3 years (Intel has been in a stall ever since they released the 3.0C 800FSB P4's, while their competitor has not only ramped up speeds during that time, but also introduced 64bit CPU's as well, which are truely spanking Intel in number crunching, hense why the reason for customer companies' demand for them).

Re:Troublemakers

[BattleTroll]

What the hell are you on about? Free market does not mean 'companies are free to do what ever the hell they want'!

The company was found guilty of price fixing, an anti-free market practice. The whole idea behind a free market is that supply and demand have a huge influence over pricing. If you allow companies to conspire to set prices across the board, any power the consumer had to influence prices goes out the window.

Imagine, if you will, large midwestern agriculture company conspires with world markets to overcharge for grain products. End result? Everyone in the world pays more for the commodity. Do a google search on 'ADM' and 'price fixing' to read about that. Extend that to drug companies, power companies, you name it. Price fixing is bad, very bad, for consumers.

I suggest you do a little research before going off on a 'government is anti-business' crusade.

Re:Rambus purchasers should pay attention

[Dink Paisy]

The same DRAM manufacturers produced both SDR (and later DDR) DRAM, and Rambus DRAM. Rambus never had fabrication facilities for producing memory, so it relied on the DRAM manufacturers to license its intellectual property, then make and sell RDRAM.

The price fixing that Rambus alleged was a conspiracy to charge much more for Rambus memory than a competitive market would. Since the same group of companies controlled the supply of both types of memory, they could do this. Rambus claimed that Rambus memory should be about ten percent (IIRC) more expensive than SDR DRAM due to higher manufacturing costs and Rambus IP licensing. The DRAM manufacturers sold it for twice the price of SDR DRAM. If Rambus is correct about the costs, then their claim that the high price of Rambus memory was due to price fixing is plausible.

Re:An honest question..

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

There is no parole for federal crimes. IANAL (yet), but I interned in the USAO in DC 2 years ago. You serve your whole sentence. There is no time off for good behavior.